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“... The Eagle has landed, Patterson’s best best-seller (which he wrote under the name of Jack Higgins), is estimated to have sold 18 million copies in 42 languages; Forsyth’s last novel, The Dogs of War, runs alongside with an estimated 20 million copies in 24 languages. These authors are the literary equivalent of the multinational ...”

“... Second World War. They were the first two characters established by the creators of the show, Tony Holland and Julia Smith (Ethel was based on a woman Holland met in a pub in Hackney). On Boxing Day 1988, seven million people watched ‘Civvy Street’, a prequel to the show that provides a backstory for all the main ...”

“... since ‘Diana Week’ in London – a sea of red and white English flags, with hardly a Union Jack to be seen – confirmed that the St George’s Cross had become the flag of the heart for millions of English families, a symbol of allegiance which had spread far beyond the football stadiums. The future of this particular nationalism – whether it will ...”

“... goes, from two of her former lovers – the Crown Prince of Germany and the Prime Minister of Holland – were of no use. ‘Please note that I am not French,’ she said in her final statement, ‘and that I reserve the right to cultivate any relations that may please me. The war is not sufficient reason to stop me from being a cosmopolitan.’ After her ...”

“... a watery division was astonishing to me. When I was very small we went to Belgium and drove to Holland one day. I couldn’t credit the unreality of it. It was the sea that said a country was a country, not an official checking passports at a border. And where were we, I wanted to know, when the car was half-way across the line dividing Belgium and ...”

“... Tea, as a significant social occasion, came into its own in the 1890s. ‘Why all these cups?’ Jack Worthing asks in The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Why cucumber sandwiches? Why such reckless extravagance in one so young? Who is coming to tea?’ Algernon explains huffily that ‘it is customary in good society to take some slight refreshment at five ...”

“... the industry would police itself. Yet the studios capitulated one by one. Leading the collapse was Jack Warner, just four years out of Mission to Moscow, who anticipated HUAC by naming the writers he thought political activists and notifying the committee that he had fired them. Among the writers in question: Philip and Julius Epstein and Howard Koch (authors ...”

“... The​ title of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s first novel, a bestseller in their native Holland and the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize, makes it seem like an Italian metaphysical painting, perhaps a de Chirico piazza or colonnade enigmatically bathed in Mediterranean light, when in fact the book is set on a Dutch dairy farm like the one on which its author was raised ...”

“... owned or annotated by famous scholars had featured in early auction catalogues in 17th-century Holland. In fact, one of the most notorious London auctions of the 1830s was devoted to them. On 7 May 1835, Samuel Sotheby began his sale of what he described as ‘many original and unpublished manuscripts, and printed books with MS annotations, by Philipp ...”

“... of whom looks older than 25. There are banners all around the fence, one of them a large Union Jack. Thousands are wearing either Italian blue or Chelsea, Man Utd or Liverpool colours – the colours dominate the coverage on TV. After the final whistle, I’m seized by four or five enthusiastic lads in the seething crowd: ‘Inggris?’ they yell ...”

“... leave Lee Harvey Oswald, for the time being, crossing the ocean, and scribbling some lines on the Holland-America Line notepaper: ‘I wonder what would happen if someone would stand up and say he was utterly opposed not only to the government, but to the people, to the entire land and complete foundation of society.’ You might say that shards of motivation ...”

“... congregation look sober and worthy, Gay Pride not much in evidence with the wreath laid by Thelma Holland, Wilde’s daughter-in-law, a link which vaults the century. After the congregation clears we do cutaway shots of the window, ‘the little patch of blue’, and that’s the end of our filming in the Abbey which has been going on, on and off, since last ...”

“... Two (Luther Perkins on guitar and Marshall Grant on bass, later augmented by W.S. ‘Fluke’ Holland on drums) were mechanics, and they sounded like it. In his eponymous autobiography Cash claims that ‘Marshall and Luther limited me, it’s true, especially in later years.’ (Perkins died in a house fire in 1968; and Grant was eventually and famously ...”

“... turn back to much-earlier conceived but relegated plans for a similar multi-volume edition, so Ian Jack tells us in the General Introduction to the first volume, which has just appeared, and is devoted to Pauline and Paracelsus. Meanwhile John Pettigrew’s own admirable edition in two volumes, completed and supplemented by Thomas Collins, and published by ...”

“... poisoned arrows buried in the feathers. The plays seem haunted now by the story of the life. When Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest says that his brother ‘expressed a desire to be buried in Paris’, Dr Chasuble replies: ‘In Paris! (Shakes his head.) I fear that hardly points to any great state of mind at the last.’ Later, Gwendolen says: ‘And ...”